


Remembering You

by 264feet



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Child Loss, Family, Gen, Intrusive Thoughts, Post-Pacifist Route, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-03
Updated: 2015-11-03
Packaged: 2018-04-29 16:13:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5134049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/264feet/pseuds/264feet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Asgore refuses to face Frisk, but can tell they're staring at him with a confused look.<br/>He tries to convince himself again, as the fight resumes, that he doesn't have nightmares anymore. </p>
<p>[A happy Undertale fic where nothing bad happens. Or, actually: this is about the six human souls, Asgore's guilt over losing a child and his actions since, Flowey's repression of himself as Asriel, and Frisk's trouble understanding death as a child. Post-True Pacifist, some references to/spoilers for the No Mercy route.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remembering You

"Why? Why are you being so nice to me?"  
  
Frisk touches Flowey for the first time. His body is as cold as if he were made of plastic. There are open gashes, but no blood. Only dust that leaves streaks on Frisk's fingers.  
  
Maybe by this point, the dream is lucid. Frisk has tried a hundred different times to end it differently. But the dream--based on a memory that never happened--refuses to change.    
  
"I can't understand... I just can't understand," Flowey is saying.    
  
It feels strange trying to hug a flower-- stranger still knowing the flower could at any moment try to choke Frisk with his vines or some other attack out of desperation. But he doesn't. Frisk feels as if they were embracing a hollow toy; mishandle it just once and its shape is ruined forever.  
  
It's a dream, and Frisk sees it from multiple perspectives. They see it from their point of view. They see it from an outsider's point of view. The see it from Flowey's point of view and is overwhelmed by the pain-- emotional rather than physical. I did it all for you, Flowey tries to say, but all that comes out is a choked sound.   
  
Flowey realizes the person in front of him can't be Chara. He's rehearsed all sorts of great lines for when he sees Chara again- 'beings like us wouldn't hesitate to kill each other!'- but Chara is gone. Flowey doesn't understand. He died himself and came back. But why only him? Why?   
  
Frisk asks the same, in fact, when wondering why they lived instead of Asriel, or even Chara. No matter what type of person they were, Asgore and Toriel must have loved them for a reason.   
  
Right?   
  
The dream doesn't provide an answer.   
  
In the dream, Flowey runs away. Frisk wonders if their mind is trying to protect them. They know what really happened.   
  
The six human souls begin to fade. They've fulfilled their purpose. Frisk keeps waiting for a seventh lost soul to join them, but they can't sense another one. Flowey truly had been empty. The other souls likely went to some kind of an afterlife, or at least rested in peace-- why had Asriel's afterlife been hell, a world without love?   
  
Frisk reaches out to the human souls--the child has so many things to thank them for--but moving their hand only scatters Flowey's ashes in the underground draft. Flowey’s fear of living had overpowered fear of death.    
  
Flowey is dead, Asgore is dead, six humans are dead, and Frisk's prize is that they alone can go back to the surface they had tried to escape from.   
  
Frisk jolts upright in bed, sweating, not sure which echo they're more afraid of: Flowey's laugh or Asriel's sobs. (Then it hits home that the six humans who died before them never made any sound at all, and there's nothing to remember them by, and that hurts just as much.)    
  
"There's nothing to worry about," Toriel always says when Frisk has these nightmares. She sits on the edge of the bed, and the child falls back asleep as she runs her fingers through their hair. "I'm right here. Nobody is hurt. We all made it to the surface."  
  
Morning flushes out the darkness and the worries. Frisk still has to readjust their eyes to sunlight; they might not have been underground long, but to be honest, the sun had bothered their eyes long before the fateful climb up Mt. Ebott. Besides, the time underground was long enough to make up for a lifetime of loneliness.    
  
The barrier is broken. They and Toriel live together now. Everyone escaped to the surface.   
  
Toriel brushes the knots out of Frisk's hair. The child looks at themself in the mirror. Chara looks back.   
  
But no, Chara is gone. Asriel is gone. Six humans are gone. Frisk will never get to learn their names, challenge them to junior jumble, share a plate of homemade spaghetti with them. For children, death is a concept brushed aside in storybooks with a drawing of clouds or flowers. But Frisk sees death when they stare in the mirror.   
  
Wasn't this the happy ending they fought for?    
  
"Oh, child." Toriel sighs. Frisk's looking away. They aren't sure how to feel, as if they've reached a situation in life they aren't supposed to encounter yet. And they're pulled into a familiar hug. "I just wish I could understand."   
  
Flowey's words echo: I just can't understand.  
  
\------------  
  
It smells of popcorn and people and either sickness spread by the crowd or thick pollen makes Frisk sneeze. The rides and stalls of the state fair cropped up overnight, and the flocks of tourists rolled in by day, like a noisy wave. Frisk is sure they would have lost Toriel in the crowd by now if she weren't clutching their hand in a vicegrip and readjusting their sun hat every few moments. The hat is far too big and droops over Frisk's eyes every few steps, and when they try to take it off, Toriel scolds them.   
  
The child found old photos of Asriel and Chara the previous night. They were in a box underneath the hat and a layer of dust. When Toriel had taken her belongings from the Underground, she took everything belonging to Asriel and Chara as well, which made Frisk feel odd in a way they couldn't understand.   
  
When they looked the next morning, the sun hat had been removed just for them. And they were sure that Chara were smiling in the same photos when they weren't yesterday. They never told Toriel. The phantom didn't, either. And so it became their secret.   
  
Candy wrappers and sun-scorched grass crunches under their feet as they march past endless attractions. Frisk tries to wipe the sour expression off their face. They point out a ride they want to go on-- too dangerous, Toriel brands it, drawing breath in past her teeth at the sounds of the ride creaking in disrepair.   
  
The hat droops over Frisk's eyes again. It would be much easier to just take it off. I'm already wearing sunblock, they want to say, but swallow it.   
  
Toriel hasn't seen the sun since monsters were driven underground. Maybe she doesn't know how to deal with it anymore.  
  
Maybe she doesn't want to take any chance at losing another child. The thought weighs Frisk down and they stumble another step.   
  
Sans puts his hot dog stand on hold to escort his brother on a ride. Papyrus is in fact tall enough to ride but doesn't meet the weight limit. "He's a little bony," Sans quips, and if it weren't for Frisk's negotiation (or: status as a human) then the brothers would have been banned from the fair for that alone.   
  
Frisk, sadly, is not tall enough to ride. They take a deep breath. It's fine. It's the rule.   
  
They've been subjected to standards like this their whole life. Not tall enough, not smart enough, skin not light enough. Humanity was past the days of parents picking out a child to adopt as if they were at a kennel, but Frisk somehow still failed dozens of invisible tests. They'd lived a lifetime of loneliness, never alone, but in the middle of group homes or foster homes with people who looked nothing like them.   
  
Their eyes dart about the fair. A child is crying, but only because they can't hold any more stuffed toys their mother bought for them. A mother is cradling a newborn, both their cheeks rosy and pink. A family is laughing, and they all look like paper dolls cut so that their hands were attached. Frisk tries to pretend that people aren't giving them weird looks for being with Toriel-- a monster.   
  
Chara had a family and hated it. The thought burrows into Frisk's mind. You wanted a family and got nothing.  
  
(When underground, Frisk thought they were only the best human because they were the only one. Now, above the ground, Frisk felt themself anxiously awaiting Toriel to either find a better child or to finally slip and call them 'Chara'.)  
  
It's unfair. Their sun hat slips and sunlight teethes at their neck and that's unfair too. Toriel is calming down Sans after some human insulted Papyrus, and Frisk can't understand why it had to happen.   
  
Unfair. Frisk knows unfair. Flowey had six souls and they had one. Plague-like swarms of locusts encompassed Frisk and the child died again as the new 'god of this world' cackled. The world reloaded and all the wounds seemingly vanished from their body, but they still stung-- as if they'd only been covered with makeup rather than healed.    
  
A chill runs down their spine and they look up. They're still at the fair. The child looks up toward the sun and closes their eyes a second later, an afterimage of color imposed over the darkness. Their hat begins to slide backwards off their head this time rather than forwards.   
  
"Frisk, come on! This way!"   
  
They run up to meet with Toriel-- they'll never hear the end of how she let go of their hand just for a minute and they got lost by zoning out in a crowd. Sweat is running down their brow. The memory of fighting Omega Flowey feels hazy, as far away as a cloud in the blue sky above; after it happened, it unhappened, the timeline resetting. Frisk just never knew by whose influence, theirs or Flowey's.   
  
They're about to catch up with Toriel, but instead get lost in a hazy memory. They remember a boy in a cowboyhat clutching a gun for dear life. But they don't just remember seeing the boy (whom Frisk has never seen)-- they remember being the boy. They feel the gun's cold metal in their hands.   
  
Until Frisk is in the boy's mind, the cowboy hat seems silly. To the boy, nothing could be more important. The hat belonged to his father, as did the gun. He felt invincible wearing his father's hat, and more invincible holding the weapon. The only reason the boy hadn't run away when he came across Asgore was the idea that he could escape and feel his father be proud of him one more time.   
  
His father had said that, when you're pointing a gun, people fear you and listen to you. It worked on the boy when he misbehaved and his father held it in his hand while talking to him. Asgore stands with his back turned to the boy now, gazing at the barrier.   
  
The boy told himself he'd shoot, he'd really do it, that any moment the giant monster would notice him and eat him alive. The gun is slipping in his sweaty hands. It's is too big for him to hold. Asgore is turning around now. The trigger is so heavy, the boy thinks; no wonder his father had never pulled it.   
  
There's a click. There's a gasp as Asgore sees the weapon and there's panicked scuffling and and the trident pierces the boy's body. The gun clatters to the ground and clicks uselessly one more time-- empty.   
  
Then, Frisk feels something familiar: death. Not their own, but the boy's. His soul slipped out of his body through the holes pierced by the trident. He isn't seeing so much as sensing, studying his lifeless body from above. The boy is confused when Asgore drops his trident in disgust.   
  
Asgore starts to curse. The boy knew that from his father-- but it dawns on him slowly that Asgore is cursing himself. The monster king draws near, but instead of eating him like the boy had expected, he places the cowboy hat gently back on the boy's head and closes his eyes. Asgore's breathing is shallow.   
  
Asgore knew Toriel. He knew that if Toriel hadn't abandoned Asgore already, she would have screamed at him, singed his fur off and left him to freeze in Snowdin's cold. "It wasn't 'self-defense'! You were never threatened to begin with!" she would say, destroying his miserable excuse and making him feel as small as the boy had. "He had no chance! He was just an innocent child! You're the perfect example of why humans called our people monsters!"  
  
But Asgore is already alone. Toriel had left, along with his excuses. The kingdom would hold a celebration upon hearing that they already had one human soul out of seven.   
  
The humans took a child from him. Now he's taken a child from them.   
  
Asgore waits days for the human's soul to move on. He only bothers to contain the soul in a weak fear that someone would notice it's loose.   
  
Gaster once had told him that, with determination, a human's soul could move on. If the human's soul left this world for the afterlife, Asgore could find peace too. But neither allow themselves.   
  
"This is for Asriel," he tells himself over and over, in order to try and make the pain stop.   
  
If only he knew how right he was.  
  
And then Frisk is snapped back to reality by Toriel's voice. "Frisk? Frisk, I'm here. It's alright." Toriel is holding Frisk close. The child's tear-stained cheeks press into her soft fur. "What's wrong? Did something upset you?"   
  
Frisk feels like the world has stopped, but it's still continuing around them. Asgore is clapping his hands nearby as a man ties balloon animals, not heaving with sobs as he realizes he never even got to know the boy's name. Aaron is sitting in the dunk machine for a monsters' charity, collecting money despite that humans are only eager to dunk the monster. A strange creature named Jerry is touching every stall with chocolate-covered hands.   
  
A few humans are side-eyeing Toriel and Frisk, as if the monster made the human cry to begin with. But none of them interrupt. Toriel is stroking her fingers through Frisk's hair. "It's okay. I won't let anything hurt you, my child. You're precious to me."  
  
Even if I'm not Chara? they want to say, but all that comes out is a whine.   
  
The vision had seemed so real that Frisk could count every freckle on the boy's face and recite every word of the argument the boy had with his father before running away from home. Frisk clutched their chest where Asgore had attacked the boy; they check, but there's nothing but smooth, unmarred skin.   
  
Frisk can't keep up with their own racing mind. They wouldn't have guessed the boy had been so upset if they'd met on their journeys through the Underground. How many other people around them at this fair were in pain? What could Frisk do if they weren't counselling the other person alone like they had with Asriel? How could Frisk save the other people they'd been scorning moments ago, before realizing unfairness wasn't something that affected only one person?  
  
All they know is that Toriel is embracing them like a mother would and they feel like the world has shrunk to just being within her grasp. Things are safe and warm and intrusive thoughts are caught in Toriel's fur as if she held a dreamcatcher.   
  
Later, the best guess Frisk would have on how they saw the memory was that, when their soul called out for help to that human's, something was transferred besides mere hope. Flowey himself had said that the soul was the culmination of one's being-- emotions, experiences, edifications.  
  
"Frisk." Asgore's voice sends a jolt down their spine. They feel like they're listening to a stranger. "Are you feeling quite alright? Would you like me to take you home?"   
  
No words come out. They stand frozen in place. Asgore had done his damndest to hide his misery when he fought Frisk; they wonder if it's an act now, too. Of all their friends they escaped with, they seemed to know the least about him. Being shown a memory like that felt like a slap across the face.   
  
They had been 'friends', sure, but Frisk isn't sure they actually know Asgore.   
  
Asgore seems to wait on an answer. Frisk starts to shake their head slowly at first, then hard enough to whip their hair about.   
  
"If you need me-"  
  
"Go." Toriel crosses her arms. They're making a scene. Humans are covering their childrens' ears. Some of the humans are crossing their arms and rolling up their sleeves as if about to throw the monsters out of the fair themselves. But Asgore walks away in a slump, and life resumes.   
  
Sans appears from behind them both, as if he'd been watching. He carries a stuffed teddy bear that he won for Papyrus, and uses his free hand to wipe Frisk's tears away on a balloon-patterned napkin. "Don't worry, kid. I'll give you a discount on a hot dog--only for a smile."   
  
Toriel seems to light up just as much as Frisk does. "Oh, truly?"   
  
The skeleton winks. "No bones about it."  
  
That gets Frisk to grin again. They sit down to eat at a picnic table with Toriel and Papyrus. The latter is rambling about the wonders of the teacups ride, having seemingly forgotten his difficulties to get on it. A newborn is crying somewhere and Frisk blocks it out, focusing on the beeps of Toriel's phone while texting and the chatter of Papyrus's teeth. Toriel places Frisk's sunhat on the table, but the child puts it back on themself a few minutes later.   
  
It was too hot without it anyway.   
  
\------------  
  
Monsters had once thought each individual soul unique. That's what anime preaches, if anything: every person is unique. For example, some of the girls have blue hair instead of brown.   
  
What Frisk had begun to learn is each person is cobbled-together from pieces of others. Asriel, for example, had taken several pieces of his mother and father before dying, leaving them as half-beings that no longer fit together.  
  
One day, Frisk is in a foster home, out poking at snail shells after dark. The man calls them a stupid child who doesn't listen to rules and Frisk catches every word, as if their ears are vacuums sucking the them in. Then the man tells them a story about a child (just like you!) who was out after dark and was killed by a goat-monster and had their body dragged around throughout a nearby village.  
  
Frisk asks what happened to the goat-monster. The man shakes his head and takes them back inside. When Frisk makes a crayon drawing of the goat-monster apologizing and a stick-figure smiling and saying "its ok," the man crumples it in his hand and throws it in the trash. Then he tells Frisk that they missed the point.   
  
Frisk takes nothing more than they can carry in their hands when they run away to climb up Mt. Ebott. Everything they own is really property of the foster system-- foster toys, foster clothes. One of the first things they leave behind is their name-- they become content to let monsters identify them as 'human'. Maybe it's odd that they leave their gender behind, but they're tired of being identified as just 'boy' or 'girl'.  
  
They wonder if they'll find the goat-monster on the mountain. They hope in the back of their mind that it will stop them from jumping into the pit with unknown depths below. They wanted to tell it that it was okay and they forgave it and anyone can be a good person.  
  
But, as Frisk jumps into what they think is the end, they suppose they really had missed the point.   
  
\---  
  
Everyone calls it 'ball' and nobody plays it. Incidentally, nobody remembers why.   
  
Some say that the hole you were supposed to kick the ball into led to a bottomless pit which, contradicting that, had a child-eating ghost at the bottom. But just as instinctively as they had taken the toy knife, Frisk finds themself outside Snowdin, kicking the snowball in the direction of the hole.   
  
This is the mind of a human: if it's there, it has to be done. Sans watches them play.   
  
The snowball is nothing but flakes of dirt by the time they even get it close. Sans says nothing, but another snowball has replaced the original in its starting position by the time Frisk trudges back.   
  
"Wanna know the secret?" Sans asks, after they fail again. Frisk nods so hard that the ribbon comes loose in their hair ('take it', an intrusive thought demanded; 'take it off the ground and tie it tight in your hair until your scalp aches'). "The secret is... patience."  
  
Patience. Patience failed Frisk already. When Frisk finds the door that seems to be a shortcut into the Ruins, the one with four mushrooms before it, they spend hours lighting them up in different patterns so the door might open and they might go speak to Toriel one last time. They want to apologize to the one family they'd had but had abandoned in their haste to keep moving.   
  
They'd waited years for someone to see them as a human being rather than a name on a waiting list. With Toriel, they'd found someone, but they had the creeping sensation that she saw them as something besides 'Frisk', and waiting might not change that.   
  
Patience. Asriel looks around for their sibling in the ball field. They said they'd be right back and told Asriel to wait there. The snowstorm is picking up. Asriel is so worried something happened and Chara got hurt, but what if they come back and he isn't there waiting for them?   
  
Asriel winds up being the one rescued rather than Chara. He's found just before he dies of hypothermia, but not before he gets a fever. Chara claims they could never find him. Asriel, eager to absorb love from his sibling rather than disdain, accepts an apology that was never there. Still, the weather is deemed too severe for games of 'ball' anymore.   
  
Asriel doesn't understand why Chara seems irritated when nobody blames them, and seems downright angry when people call them a 'savior' for pointing out that it was a dangerous game to begin with.   
  
Patience. When Chara dies, Asgore mourns like he never thought he would over a human. Toriel says that human souls are like stars in the sky ("above us?")-- burning with determination. Only if they were properly put to rest would the souls move on.   
  
Asgore is thinking up ways to help Chara move on when he realizes the soul is already gone.   
  
Later, when their living child is missing along with the soul, they say that Asriel is a good boy. He'll explain everything. He'll come home. They just have to wait.   
  
And he does come home. For a little while.   
  
Hearing Asgore and Toriel cry, whether in an out-of-place memory or in a nearby room after they think Frisk is asleep, is enough for Frisk to lose all confidence that adults are invincible.   
  
\---  
  
The barrier is named 'The Barrier'.   
  
Asgore knows there are whispers that he has no creativity. He doesn't mind. Talk is talk. But if he gives the barrier an actual name, he fears he'll never be able to destroy it.  
  
He doesn't talk to the second human much. He thinks it will be easier to kill them if he doesn't know them. Veternarians don't spend an hour playing with family pets before they have to put them to sleep.   
  
It isn't easier. The one chance he'd had in weeks to interact with someone else, and he's rejected it in case he rubbed off on them, releasing yet another Asgore into the world.   
  
The first member of his social circle had divorced him and taken away every decision. She had been the one making them all along. She had decided to adopt Chara as their own rather than hurting them. Asgore agreed without complaint. He, ironically, was too afraid of hurting anyone.   
  
The second member of his social circle thinks of herself as a weapon to be pointed rather than a mind to make decisions. Asgore has trouble speaking with her, not because she doesn't believe a word he says, but because she believes everything. Many others have faith in his plan to destroy humanity, but Asgore rarely faces anyone anymore, and thus it's easier to distance himself from them.   
  
She leaves him with nothing but 'if's--if he had stopped Asriel from passing through the barrier to begin with, if she had joined the Royal Guard later in life, if he wasn't so damned fatherly to everyone he met...maybe she never would have showed up, maybe she wouldn't follow his every word. Maybe she would actually suggest he absorb one soul and go to the surface like he feared. Maybe none of this would have happened. It's hard for someone who makes no decisions to tell.   
  
A certain royal scientist would have been included in his social circle, had they both not isolated themselves out of mutual guilt and shame. And so the last member of his social circle had grown in the middle of his throne room.   
  
Humans aren't the only ones good at erasing history. Sobs don't wrack Asgore's body. The flower doesn't call him 'dad'. None of this happens, and thus Asgore remembers none of it.    
  
Now he's alone. The two human souls never spoke, of course not, but still asked Asgore in whispery words every day if it was worth it.   
  
And in complete isolation, with nobody to compare himself to and nobody to absorb anything from like a sponge, how did he know?   
  
(He wonders, sometimes, if any of his words make it through the barrier. Little does he know that humans have several myths of mysterious crying sounds, as if by ghosts, originating from some empty point of the night.)  
  
He thinks of the gun that the boy had pointed at him. When humans shot monsters down, the monsters' corpses disappeared, but the bullets remained. Now, if Asgore would absorb both human souls, bullets would melt upon coming into contact with him, akin to the way objects caught fire and disintegrated coming into the Earth's atmosphere. But he already felt that way--like he ruined everything he came into contact with.   
  
Behind him, just a room away, a little flower had watched in fearful awe as the man he once called 'dad' murdered a human in cold blood.   
  
\---  
  
Frisk finds out, later, that the little flower had tried his hardest to help the human escape to the world that killed him. It was as if  it had been in vain hope that he might find Chara along the way. Maybe it was ironic, too, that Frisk wanted to return to that world. They don't think so much about the destination as the journey. The only reason they return is because they don't have to go alone. (At least, not the first time, after the death of Flowey.)  
  
Asgore, with a fatherly smile and a lumbering step, had made it to the outside world like a beggar in a jewelry shop--not touching anything, but looking about in awe at everything he didn't deserve.   
  
Undyne opts to live with Alphys, and Frisk clutches Toriel's hand when she asks if they have somewhere to go. Papyrus and Sans stay together like noodles and tomato sauce. Asgore walks into daylight alongside the group, but not necessarily with them.   
  
When they elect Frisk as the ambassador of monsters, the child knows in the back of their mind that it means they're the only human who doesn't spit on monsters when they pass in the street.  
  
Asgore comes home with gum placed in his fur and bruises below it. He walks as if he weren't capable of crushing a human's skull in his hand, and responds to fearful whispers with a friendly wave. Sans, who told him they have a free couch now that Undyne's gone, takes care of him the best he can. But even Frisk knows that Sans himself works three jobs and lives in a part of the neighborhood so far away from them all that he uses the wage of one to commute.   
  
Frisk winds up developing a temper. They shout at strangers twice their size that monsters had lots of potential to be good if given a chance. Strangers replied that they had more potential for harm, and that's what caused the first war.   
  
Frisk would look to Asgore for support, would ask why he accepts their abuse with a smile. Asgore would tell them it's because people's minds are like sponges, and would reply to hatred with hatred, but kindness with kindness.   
  
Humans had hated monsters and expected, natually, them to hate back.   
  
(And Asriel had told Frisk that conflicts couldn't always be resolved by being nice, but Asgore thought he was dead, and in a sense he was, and so they hold the words in.)  
  
When Frisk asks where Asgore learned that ideology, he replies, "from you."   
  
\------------  
  
Now that they're on the surface, Toriel holds out longer on that snail pie.   
  
When Frisk is cooking, the world is just the sizzle of the pan and the rumble of their stomach. The only interruption is occasional guidance from Toriel, who's truthfully in charge of the meal tonight--but she lets Frisk have their fun. She's invited everyone over for dinner, only remembering too late that 'everyone' included Asgore.   
  
It's been enough hours since the boy in the cowboy hat's memory that Frisk can look at Asgore without averting their eyes, feeling that they saw something they shouldn't have. They had known that Asgore and Toriel had been in despair over the loss of their children, but even a glimpse at the full scope of Asgore's pain had wounded Frisk.   
  
Could they ever fill the missing pieces in Asgore and Toriel, the way they had packed dirt into what was once the barrier?  
  
The question seems distant a moment later. Asgore sits with buttons popping on his hawaiian shirt and tells Alphys his favorite anime is King of the Hill and scratches his cheek when the whole kitchen erupts in laughter.   
  
Still, the question remains. Had Toriel smiled as wide for Chara? Asriel had said they weren't the greatest person. Frisk has to wonder, for a moment, if they're even worse.   
  
When Toriel places a hand on Frisk's shoulder or guides their hand with her own, Frisk remembers again each time that the wounds Flowey and Asgore left on their body are gone. They want to doubt that those fights ever happened. They want to, in their weakest moments, ask Asgore if he remembers being killed.   
  
The monster king had fought Frisk as miserably if he were the one about to die. He was so pained by the sins crawling on his back that Frisk--who brushed the ground before they sat down so they wouldn't squash any bugs--managed to win.   
  
Frisk had raised their weapon with a shaking hand-   
  
Frisk stirs the veggies in the pan. They grip the spoon hard until their knuckles turn white. Asgore asks if the meal will be spicy because he gets heartburn. Toriel gives him a look that chills him enough that a meal on fire wouldn't defrost him. The room bursts into laughter again and Frisk doesn't know how to ask Asgore if he remembers dying.   
  
If he remembers dying and not seeing Asriel in the afterlife.   
  
Frisk had showed mercy at the end of Asgore's fight. They had done their best even if Asgore had tried his hardest to prove he wasn't worthy. In his final moments, as if he saw a glimmer of hope, Asgore used it as a chance to turn around the mess he had created. "I promise you... For as long as you remain here, my wife and I will take care of you as best we can-"   
  
They had been the last words he said before Flowey tore him in half, tore those halves in half, did all but create every speck of dust himself by obliterating Asgore's body. He had, after all, just heard his own father offer to replace him and his sibling with a child he had just met. (And Frisk had wanted to accept, that was the worst part--they were weak and tired and didn't care if they had to live as a panacea for someone's grief, so long as they could just put their head down and rest.)  
  
The last time Frisk and Asriel had spoken, he urged Frisk to go off and be with his friends. Now, Frisk thinks they had accepted too quickly. If Asriel remained, tending the flowers day by day, he wouldn't last long. Frisk hadn't lasted long in isolation, either. Why would Asriel?  
  
They put the pan aside and turn the heat off the stove. They take a shaky breath. Everyone is gathered about the table like a happy family, and Frisk has gone without one for so long that they don't feel like they deserve to be a part of it even now.   
  
It seemed like Asgore had adopted them, after all, no matter how furious it would make Flowey. Would Asriel be frowning at them? Why had Asriel only been allowed to see sunlight in his dying moments?  
  
They rest their hand precariously close to the still-steaming burner. Frisk feels like they've walked in to an advanced physics test. They understand what's before them, but don't really get it. How are they supposed to feel?   
  
The same words echoed in Flowey's mind: how am I supposed to feel? He hadn't spoken them, but somehow Frisk still heard it in the vision--Flowey's memory.   
  
\---  
  
Flowey always found he was a bit uncomfortable on the first loop of a timeline. He was on a reconnaissance mission without any prior briefing besides a vague sense of what Chara would have done.   
  
"Howdy! My name is--" he trips over his own name for a moment. "Flowey!"   
  
So he'd said, before the strange girl steps fully into the light. Her foot seems to be sideways. Her eyes are red and puffy. He questions if she's really a human, for a moment, if only because Chara never showed emotion like that.   
  
Flowey tries to remember what it feels like to cry.   
  
(He could still feel some things, at least. Sensations had overwhelmed him when he awoke from death.  Only slowly did Asriel realize that none of them had affected his arms or legs.)  
  
Asgore had failed to get him to feel anything; Toriel had failed to get him to feel anything; Flowey had begged and pleaded at Chara's grave for them to come back and tell him it would be alright and that they had a plan. They always had a plan.  
  
Even if Chara came back as a flower too, it would be alright, so long as they wouldn't be alone. Flowey had prayed for someone to come. Flowey saved and reloaded the timeline hundreds of times, just in case there would be one occurence where Chara would return too--or even instead of Asriel himself.    
  
But for days, the only person he spoke to was Toriel. It felt like longer, and in fact, it was for him. Days became months with how many times he had reloaded. He already feels like he's lived a miserable hermit's lifetime when he meets the human girl who's babbling words and dripping snot.   
  
She wears some kind of apron which is a bit too big for her. It amazes him she doesn't trip over it. He regards the girl with empathy the best he can--as if he were speaking words in a foreign language he didn't understand.   
  
I could kill her right now, he thinks. Asriel had never had intrusive thoughts prior to merging with Chara's soul. Now, Flowey isn't sure how to deal with them.   
  
I could strangle her with vines until she stopped breathing. Toriel wouldn't know. Nobody would know.   
  
And if someone does know, Flowey remembers: he could reload, and then they wouldn't.    
  
He's shaking. What is he, afraid of himself? Is this what people are without love? But Chara would have done it, and Asgore himself had begun to--no. Flowey chases the thoughts out of his head after all.    
  
The girl mistakes his shaking for some kind of empathy and lets out a choked sound.   
  
"You're gonna be alright," Flowey says. Even he doesn't believe his words--the bloodstain on the apron is growing as steadily as liquid on a paper towel. "I can... I can get Toriel over. She has bandages. She can, you know, she can fix you right up-"   
  
The child collapses onto him and pins him underneath. Blood, it smells overwhelmingly of blood, like when he was carrying home Chara's body. He tries to scream but the taste enters his mouth.   
  
The taste is the only way he knows it wasn't a nightmare when he reloads and he hears the girl's shambling footsteps.   
  
Flowey skips the introduction this time and gets to work right away. He has an endless number of tries. He's solved dozens of other problems by now just by reloading.  
  
Chara could have saved her on the first try--so just give up and let her die, comes the intrusive thought, but he forces himself to focus on the task at hand.   
  
"Hold still," he commands. He expects her to resist, but she does as he says, albeit while half-sitting. Standing must have become too painful for her.   
  
Flowey lifts the apron with a vine. The girl's leg is bent at an odd angle, and blood is trailing down her leg. Her skirt sticks to her skin as if the blood were glue. There's some kind of red spot lower on her leg which isn't bleeding, Flowey notices. The irritation in the skin seems to be spreading, but that seems separate from the wound she must have gotten from falling down here.   
  
He doesn't understand the wound lower on her leg until he realizes it's a bite of some kind. The flesh has barely been broken, as if pricked by needles. The skin around it is irritated.   
  
It reminds Flowey of how Chara had been bitten by a spider, once--after trying to tear it in half with their hands. Chara had neatly treated the wound themself while Asriel had just blubbered. When they got home, Asgore had-  
  
The image flashes back into Flowey's mind: his father killing a human he had tried to save. He must have known something I didn't, Flowey thinks. He must have been protecting me.   
  
Then why did he look so miserable?   
  
Flowey makes a face. He let his mind wander a second too long.   
  
He tries to focus again. What had Chara done to treat their bite? The spiders in the ruins weren't venomous. Flowey had no idea about the ones aboveground.   
  
Toriel. Toriel would know. Go ahead, cry to mommy, a voice tells him, and Flowey is too busy hurrying to find her that he doesn't realize the voice sounds like Chara's.   
  
"Stay here!" he calls back. He's made it out of the room by the time she collapses. He's made it back with Toriel by the time her heart has stopped beating.   
  
Toriel doesn't let out any sobs, any screams, as if she knows someone is watching, even if Flowey won't let her remember that 'someone' is her dead son. She's already lost two children, and a reminder of that had collapsed on her doorstep.   
  
Flowey sees everything separately, but not as a whole. He understands Toriel must be sad. He understands he should feel something as well besides numbness.   
  
Everything about the scenario is alien. He had experienced death, but this was death viewed from another angle--the difference between being yourself and watching someone do an impression of you. Had Toriel not cried for him, either? Would she be crying if this girl was damned into reincarnation as a miserable flower? Had Toriel felt anything for her son, Asriel, to begin with?   
  
Oh. but how she cried for Chara, how she sat by their bedside while the child was 'ill' for hours and hours! Flowey feels his mind racing--it's the only indication he has now that he's alive. It's the closest thing he has to anger, and he revels in it.    
  
He reloads. He hears shambling footsteps once again. The girl must be tripping over her bum leg. He tries to go back further, but fails.   
  
Toriel is too far away. He has to either solve this himself or find a way to buy time. He has to do this. Chara would know what to do, he thinks--his own, non-intrusive, chosen thought--and he hates himself for it.   
  
"Your apron."   
  
The strange girl doesn't seem to even register the words, but doesn't protest when Flowey rips off the apron. He ties it, finishing the knot around the girl's bite the best he can, one end of the cloth held by a vine and the other by his own teeth. He fumbles once (from nerves? Because this is so much harder now that his arms and legs have been torn away?) but finishes the job. The bleeding hadn't killed her-- Asriel knew from bitter experience that it took longer for that to happen. His guess was that it was the potential venom from the bite.   
  
He doesn't know what he hopes to accomplish with this, but he's tied the apron as tight as it would go. Maybe it would slow the circulation enough that he could get Toriel.    
  
The child collapses onto him and pins him underneath. Blood, it smells overwhelmingly of blood like when he was carrying home Chara's body. He screams curses, but they're muffled by her still torso.   
  
And then he hears shambling footsteps. He again does everything he can and she dies like a dog. He says encouraging words and she makes guttural sobbing noises. He reloads again and again and she's so determined to die and end the pain--humans are more than this! Chara was more than this! He reloads again, he drags her behind him as he rips through the ground to get to Toriel. And the whole way, the whole damned way, she awkwardly claws at him as if he were the villain.   
  
The petal she rips off returns when he reloads. He's seething. His breath comes in deep gasps. He hears shambling footsteps. The stupid child is crying over their damned bite and seems to deserve his help with her mere presence-- why, why did humans expect anything of him when they had beaten him to death?   
  
"WHY. WON'T. YOU. LIVE?" he shrieks. Vines tear through the dirt and find their way around her ankles the way snakes strangle their prey. The little flower has no strength in his body-- he had believed that when he was dragged back into the world and believed it until he throws the child. She lands headfirst. Flowey never thought humans' necks could twist like that.   
  
They can't, he realizes, as the headache starts to dull and as he looms over the child's corpse. He feels--he feels something. He feels alive in the wake of her death. He feels like a living being and not a phantom intruding on his own parents' mourning. He feels like he's taken her soul even if it's still aching in her body.   
  
The only thing he dosen't feel is guilt, no matter how hard he tries.   
  
Now do it, a part of him thinks. Take her soul for real.   
  
He's shaking. The girl's eyes are still open. The last expression on her face seems to show confusion and betrayal, as if she had shadows of memories of Flowey trying to save her life.   
  
Asriel had cried the first time Chara had killed a wild animal. His sibling had baited a mouse out into the open with cheese. As soon as the mouse trusted them and reached out to eat the cheese, Chara lowered their knife swift as a guillotine.   
  
Flowey--empty, now--doesn't know enough about emotion to recognize if Chara had felt guilty or not when Asriel had wept over the mouse. He had thought Chara chose to involve him in their plan to attack humanity because they liked him, because they trusted him as a brother. Asriel, running toward his sibling's affection like a mouse towards cheese, had accepted without question.   
  
Stop stalling, Flowey can hear now. But there's no actual sound but a distant wind whistling through the flowers Toriel had planted nearby. Go ahead. Reload. You would do it again. You enjoyed it. Now take your prize.  
  
Flowey is startled by how easily he takes to the idea. It's the logical choice. It's the right choice. It's what Chara would want. Flowey had reloaded these few minutes from his save dozens of times, but it was an impossible situation.   
  
Impossible-- and his mind drifts to the image of Asgore killing again. His father, who had cried at the end of beautiful children's books just as much as Asriel had, and who raised Asriel high up in the air when he was proud of him and made him feel like he was flying.   
  
He almost wished that would happen again. But his father would just rip him from the ground and kill him once and for all. Had he always wanted to? Had he just been holding back killing for Asriel's sake?   
  
This is wrong, he thinks--he wants to think that, anyway. Flowey tries to sober himself. The Asriel in him protests the way he had overpowered Chara's will the first time.   
  
But for once, everything in life makes sense. Why had Chara tried to expose Asriel to killing? Why was Asgore killing now? The same thing Asriel had failed to realize, and maybe the thing he had been brought back to life to learn. This was the world. Kill or be killed.   
  
He's almost gone through with it, too, until he hears that Toriel is walking up to check if anyone has fallen down. He curses and hides himself below the dirt. He hears a gasp and feels Toriel's stomping overtop him.   
  
He should reload the timeline and kill the girl again. No, he should jump up now and knock out Toriel. No, he should reload and take the girl's soul and then rub it in Toriel's face, couldn't save me, couldn't save her, how does it feel you old fucking hag?   
  
There's nothing but silence answering him in his mind. Toriel is carrying the body away to bury it--but infuriatingly, she doesn't do it right there in the Ruins. She doesn't uncover the dirt and find Flowey, just out of reach like a bad dream. She doesn't even try to dig up the stone floor of the rest of the Ruins; she leaves with the child through her secret exit as she does when she goes to buy groceries for Frisk years in the future.   
  
Flowey lets it all happen. The intrusive thoughts can't find him when he's hiding like this. He can't feel like he failed Chara a second time when he's hiding like this.   
  
He'd remain until Toriel returned and went to the big door as usual--the 'proper' exit to the ruins.   
  
If she would turn around, she would see him. But she sits by the door and laughs her meager laugh when someone on the other side tells jokes. She'd had several different laughs, from the gentle to the snorting one when with Asgore.   
  
Flowey supposed he'd never hear the latter again, now. And now that Toriel's misery had surfaced as bleakly as clouds parting to reveal a dim sky with no sun, he wondered if he'd ever hear the gentle laugh again, either.  
  
"If a human ever comes through this door... could you please, please promise me something? Watch over them, and protect them... will you not?"  
  
Her voice is as pitiful as the human's, but there's a tinge of fear. Unmistakeable. It's as if she knew that the human had died from a snapped neck rather than a venemous bite--or as if she knew that, for some reason, she couldn't put the human's soul to rest.   
  
Flowey listens to her talk about the human. Flowey waits longer and longer as the voice on the other side cheers her up, diverts her attention, and finally makes a promise. The name 'Asriel' never comes up.   
  
Talking about a human--only then does his mother cry.  
  
\---  
  
It takes less than an hour for Flowey to trace Toriel's steps. She walked far, as if she were going all the way to the capital (to kill Asgore? Flowey wonders. Was his mother a murderer now too?), or as if to show the dead child all the sights underground she would never be able to see.   
  
On the other hand, it takes weeks for Flowey to search every available spot where Toriel's footprints stopped and to realize someone's dug up the corpse before he could.   
  
He never lets himself hear the end of it. You thought nobody would find it? You thought nobody saw her bring it here? You thought no other monster would want her soul when you passed it up?  
  
It stings worse when Flowey realizes that the person who took the soul was probably, in fact, Asgore himself. These other monsters were too passive, too absorbed with a society miming human society. Everything was such a stupid carbon copy, like the currency, that the monsters missed that humans understood 'kill or be killed'. But Asgore was at the head of monster society. He must have understood.   
  
When Flowey had been Asriel (it should scare Flowey how easily he's able to distance himself from that, now), Toriel had handled the discipline. Asgore had been too afraid of hurting the children.   
  
Now Asgore had stolen a child's corpse for her soul which, not fully calmed by Toriel, never went to rest.   
  
Flowey curses himself knowing if he just took the kid's soul, he would have had the power to steal whichever ones Asgore had. Being the way he was--a phantom, an ascian--he couldn't get past Asgore with brute force and was never able to coax him into showing Flowey the souls.   
  
Not even when he threatens to tell Toriel what he had done. It was a last-ditch resort. He knew it wouldn't work. It turns out to be the second closest Asgore ever comes to showing Flowey the souls, but he doesn't.   
  
The closest Asgore would come to showing Flowey the souls and admitting what he had done had already come and gone, when Flowey first was reborn into the world and told his father what had happened.   
  
\---  
  
There are still several things Flowey doesn't understand, no matter how many times he reloads, no matter how many things he does differently. He doesn't understand why he feels nothing. He feels like he's been struck blind and someone changed all the world's colors while he couldn't see. He doesn't understand how his powers work, either. He knows he can move forward and backward in time with loads and saves, but his ability to change the timeline is as if he's riding a train--he can move between tracks, but can't lay them down himself.   
  
He can't change the reality that his father, who knew fully well that Asriel had spared humans, who had cared for a human as his own son, was going to murder all of them in cold blood.  
  
He can't change the reality that Chara would have been happy about it, and he can't change the reality that he doesn't know why. He can't change the reality that he finds himself killing and, after doing so, he'll look back each time in the direction of Chara's grave, as if for approval.  
  
\---  
  
"So she said she 'might' give him another chance?"  
  
Frisk nods. It occurs to Sans how small their body really is, too small for the worries of people who might as well be their parents. The weight of the world was on their shoulders, a tiny Atlas.   
  
Frisk had, after the meal, confronted Toriel about her grudge against Asgore. They were perceptive enough to know that Toriel had only agreed to look Asgore in the eye again in order to ease Frisk's discomfort, but not because she wanted to.   
  
"Kid..." Sans sighs. "It's gonna take them time. They're grown-ups, and grown-ups... they're really tied to their grudges n' gossip and other childish stuff, because they think it's 'mature' now that they're grown up."   
  
Frisk doesn't look convinced. Sans isn't sure what to say. It's so easy to cheer up Papyrus--maybe they've just been together longer.  
  
"I think both of 'em are hurting," Sans says. "And you know hurt people, well, hurt people. It's the same with the humans up here who think they know us. They don't know us. It'll take them time to get used to us again. Until then, we gotta stick with what we know. Puns and smiles and kindness. The best way to get back at them is to prove them wrong."   
  
Frisk had watched Flowey try kindness. It had failed him. The world had failed him, Frisk thought, remembering how Asriel had been killed. Now Frisk wondered if a part of the boy had still been Flowey, after all, when he mentioned that not all the world's problems could be solved by kindness alone.   
  
But, Frisk thinks, once they put on a smile for Sans--the way to solve the world's problems isn't to give up, either.   
  
\--------------------  
  
"Excuse me, do you want to know how to beat me?"   
  
Asgore holds out a hand for the child to take. It's infuriating to her--he used the same hand to parry every attack she launched and hadn't used it to retaliate once. The girl thinks about launching a surprise punch, but she would probably just fall on her rear again. She instead takes his hand with disdain and lets him help her to her feet.   
  
"Of course I do!"   
  
"Well... Undyne, was it?" Asgore says. He's turned around now, rifling through his possessions for some bandages. Chara had always gotten mysterious cuts somehow--Asgore kept close a first-aid kit, even after it was far too late to save his sons. He took out a sterilizing wipe and a bandage. The girl had scraped a knee trying to fight him.   
  
"Yeah, Undyne..." She knows an opportunity when she sees one. Undyne launches herself forward, bum knee or not, determined to knock the monster king down. "Undyne the Undying!"  
  
But he turns back around and she just collides with his belly, bouncing off as if she'd hit a mattress. She huffs when Asgore offers to help her to her feet again and instead stays put on the ground. He bends down and wipes the knee clean--Undyne winces--then places the bandage on all the same.   
  
"I'll tell you the secret on how to beat me," Asgore says, face-to-face with the child, "if you tell me a secret too."   
  
"... Fine. What is it?"   
  
"Why is it you want to be stronger than me?"   
  
"'Cause then nobody will be able to beat me!" she boasts.   
  
"Oho. Well, sure. What then?"   
  
"Then... then I'll..." Darn it, Undyne thinks. He's beating her again by talking her into a corner! "I'll... free all the monsters that are trapped here underground! And we'll be free!"  
  
His face is weighed with concern. "That's quite the heavy subject for a girl your age to think about."   
  
"How can I not think about it?!" Don't cry. I won't forgive you if you cry, Undyne thinks to herself. But the king looks so big and understanding, even if she had come at him with fists flying and no warning. She can't help but let her true feelings flow out. "I-It's there every day, everywhere! Everyone's talking about when we can go home and what humans did! To us and... and to those kids!"   
  
They were just children, the monsters were oft saying. It had been years since Asriel had been killed on the coattails of Chara's death; Undyne would learn the specifics later. Still, everyone spoke about it daily, as if their words were as powerful as humans' and that talking might change what happened or ignite another spark of hope.   
  
At the time, Undyne doesn't know who 'they' refers to, but it hurts her all the same seeing everyone so upset. The monsters need the prophecy to come true. She didn't know the specifics of it either. When Undyne thought 'prophecy', she pictured herself perched on a mountaintop as the sun rose. She knew the monsters spoke of an angel who would free them all. Undyne had practically felt the wings, several times bigger than her body, as she stomped up to King Asgore for the first time.   
  
"A-and I'll make everyone smile again, no matter how bad things are...!"   
  
She charges forward again as if to try and knock him down, but she only collapses into his embrace. Even in several years, after Frisk helps set all the monsters free, Undyne still is learning how deeply the deaths of Asgore's sons have wounded him. He had still been mourning even when they met for the first time. But he'd faced that despair head on and even put a smile on for her, like a father would.   
  
Asgore pats her back. "You aren't alone," he says. "All of us will work together, and then we'll go free. We have to be brave."   
  
"I still wanna do something! I've gotta do something if nobody else will!"   
  
"Well, you told me your secret, so I'll tell you mine," Asgore says. She lets go of him and he stands back up to his full height. "I do have a plan to set us all free."  
  
"What?" she gasps. "Really?"   
  
"Yes. We'll need seven, well..." He averts his eyes. He wishes he didn't have to expose the child to this, but the people know of how he swore revenge. It's only a matter of time. Hearing people talk brought Undyne this far already. "Seven human souls."  
  
He explains the barrier, and he explains what happens when a monster absorbs a human soul. He hadn't been idle, he explains; he was just waiting for humans to fall into the underground (and she believes it, and doesn't even consider that Asgore could have just absorbed one and gotten six aboveground). She listens to the plan not seeing the words individually, but seeing the sun rise over the mountaintop.   
  
"... And since you've listened to me patiently, I'll tell you what you wanted to hear: how to knock me down."   
  
Undyne leans forward. The pain in her knee has been long since forgotten.   
  
"Battle is not all about brute force. It's just as psychological as it is physical. A good opponent will read your body language and emotions  on the battlefield and use it to their advantage."  
  
"So you're saying... I shouldn't feel anything?"  
  
"No, no," Asgore says, chuckling. Undyne seems frustrated, but he continues: "I could never extinguish your fighting spirit. What I mean is that you should never let them see you lose hope, no matter how bleak the situation may be. If you believe there's a way to win, there always will be."   
  
In the future, Asgore refuses to even let Frisk see his face--his fear that his plan will, in fact, actually work.   
  
If a human ever beats me, Undyne vows, I won't let them see me break. I won't let them see me lose hope, 'cause monsters gotta have hope.   
  
\---   
  
She maintains the philosophy until, after much training, she knocks Asgore down and he beams. She maintains the philosophy until there are whispers of a human in the underground and she  runs to face them. It's the first human she'll fight, the first human soul she'll collect for Asgore, and she's stunned when it's not a mighty warrior, but a child with only the armor of gloves and a bandana.  
  
There's a burning passion in the child's eyes that's all too familiar. Frisk would be unreadable in everything but their damned mercy; this child, several years before Frisk, stands as tall as they can, even that's just half Undyne's height. She's a young teen, but Asgore teases her about how tall she'll be one day.   
  
The child deserves for the fight to be as fair as it can, and so Undyne explains they'll have to face her head-on or they'll never win. She starts slow, going through the motions, practicing her stance for battle. This is it. This is her debut fight. Royal Guardsmen apologized with cards and cake when they accidentally hurt one another during sparring. She's ready for some real action.   
  
She expects the child to cry. They never do, from the moment the battle initiates to the moment they begin to fight back. Undyne parries all their punches with just one hand the way Asgore had for her. What really hits her is when the child tires out and she raises a spear and has the perfect opportunity to strike the killing blow.  
  
They never did anything, says a little voice, like the angel on her shoulder.   
  
She shakes her head. No. The child is a human. Neither of them would be here if it wasn't for what humans did.   
  
Her breathing goes funny for a moment. When she learns more and more about the children that Asgore lost, she finds that not both of them were of his species. It comforts her in an odd way, as if their bond is less unusual. Undyne blocks out that the other child might have been human.   
  
She again expects the child to cry when she rears back to strike. The world is quiet. The wind is still. Asgore had told her that a moment's hesitation could kill her on the battlefield. That's right. She had tact.   
  
The child doesn't cry, from the moment the spear hits them to the moment when they realize they'll never see home again.   
  
(Asgore had also said that a true warrior should win most conflicts by solving them peacefully. Undyne said she didn't understand. He gave a sad smile. There was recognition in his eyes.)  
  
In the future, Undyne would quip that there was no point telling Frisk the tragic tale of their people 'as was customary' since the kid was about to die anyway. It had stuck out in Frisk's mind; had Undyne actually ever explained it to others?   
  
The answer had been no. She hadn't explained it before any of her battles. She hadn't explained it to any monsters, who had been alive longer than her--long enough to have experienced the history themselves.   
  
She did explain it just this once, when she tried to pick up the body to bring it to Asgore and the child twitched.   
  
If she had ever been concerned with being polite, she would have tried to think of a way to ask 'why are you still alive'. Regardless, the words just catch in her throat. This kid's soul with their determination would probably thrash like a fly in a jar.  
  
And so she finds herself telling them about how, long ago, two races ruled over the earth: humans and monsters. She stumbles over the words af if she were two beats behind the rhythm of a dance. It's not a cheap excuse, she's saying as an aside, it's a sad history (not like human history) and it's the grim reality of the world. It's why she had to do this.   
  
She had to. (A part of her tacks on that she had never killed, only bested opponents down in sparring and speared training dummies in half--but it happened in anime all the time, what was this but a part of life?)   
  
She takes a shaky breath. No. If she cried over every enemy she struck down on the battlefield, she'd be dead in an instant, and she'd deserve it. She had to be stronger. Tougher. Her words reach a boiling point and it's like she's attacking the defeated child, muttering 'humans' this and 'hurt us' that.  
  
Growing up in the Underground, this was all she knew. Her mother carried her under an arm when monsters were exiled deeper and deeper into the earth. If she was angry, it was because of how sad it seemed to make Asgore--sad enough that even she would pick up on it.   
  
Undyne keeps an eye on the child. She expects them to launch a surprise attack--a failed sucker punch the way she herself had attempted when trying to fight Asgore for the first time. They didn't the whole way over to the royal capital, and don't now, when she realizes they're dead in her arms.   
  
You did it for Asgore, for the benefit of all monsters, she thinks.   
  
The angel on her shoulder spreads its wings and says this: they were just a child.  
  
And suddenly Undyne is a child again, fighting Asgore who was more than twice her size, fueled by passion and refusing to let it die. Undyne had vowed she'd never let a human see her cry. But now the human is dead, and a war is raging inside her-- her fear and anger and despair are stabbing on the inside of her skin, demanding to be let out. She grits her teeth harder and harder until they threaten to snap out of her jaw. The only thing keeping her going is the simple knowledge: one leg in front of the other, you're almost at the capital, turn here, keep walking straight here.   
  
"Undyne!"   
  
Papyrus's voice is the last thing she needs. She hears his boots clomping up behind her. She refuses to turn her head; she doesn't know what kind of expression her face is betraying, but even she doesn't want to see it.   
  
"What's that you're holding?" Papyrus is asking. They've been friends for a short time now, but she can already tell he never changes. She can feel him trying to look around her without running ahead of her and tripping her up. "Even the Great Papyrus doesn't recognize that kind of monster! Are you going to introduce us?"   
  
Left leg, right leg. Left leg, right leg. You murdered a child without questioning it, right leg. Left leg, no questioning myself will get me killed and only wimps sit there and cry and I'm goddamn brave.   
  
"I'll have you know I kept my brother in-line all day today while we were searching for humans!" Papyrus boasts. "I came up with some great new puzzles if I ever meet one! I really hope they like spaghetti too! Do you think humans know you invented spaghetti? But, ahem, we perfected it!  
  
"Hey, why is your new friend not talking? Hi, little person! Nice to meet you but trust me, the honor is all yours! Nyeh! Say, Undyne, they aren't very responsive. Perchance, have I interrupted their nap--"   
  
"SHUT UP!"  
  
She's shaking. She's only just turned her head enough to see him and oh god it hurts, he looks all the world like a prized puppy that was kicked; the world is silent like after a child has fallen down and isn't sure yet how to react or gauge their own pain. Undyne feels as if she's breathing on land through gills.   
  
Undyne hadn't just thought she was brave, she knew it. She knew what 'brave' meant. The humans attacking the monsters based on the idea that one might absorb a human soul was cowardly. It hadn't been a war; it had been a slaughter, with the victims leaving nothing for their families to remember them by but dust. She was brave, fighting an oppressor, something that deserved to be called a 'monster', a--   
  
a child. She was no better than the humans. It only fuels her contempt that they'd make her break down like this-- snap at Papyrus like this. She blames them, not herself. It's their fault they attacked. It's their fault they sent humans down after them like this; the monsters had little territory in comparison to the humans, so couldn't they just stay where they belonged?   
  
("That's right," Flowey would say to Frisk. "Just look around you. This is how the world is. Kill or be killed.")  
  
Undyne takes a shaking breath. "Just... to your post," she says to Papyrus. Her armor clangs the whole way to Asgore's throne room, but even then, she knows she's not being followed.   
  
\---  
  
To Undyne's surprise, Papyrus approaches her first.   
  
She'd been waiting for Sans to come talk to her or try to kill her--one of the two. Yet he hadn't. Undyne was well aware she'd have to face Papyrus eventually. He never missed his reports, no matter what.  
  
Yet here he was, too early for a report. And for what, to resign from the job she never really gave him?   
  
"Er-- excuse me, Undyne--"  
  
Oh god, here it comes. He probably wouldn't even want to cook with her anymore. And then his brother would come kill her.   
  
"I'm here to say... I'm sorry. "  
  
"... Huh?"   
  
"I came to report to you when I wasn't scheduled to report and interrupted you on your important business," he says. "To be quite honest, I was somewhere in the 'confused and upset' zone, which is not a fun place to be. You never speak unjustly to anyone, so I must have... been in the wrong. My brother of course noticed something was off about my powerful demeanor and charismatic aura--"  
  
He cried on his shoulder, Undyne mentally translated.   
  
"-- and suggested I be the bigger person," Papyrus continues. "I'm still unclear on what physical size has to do with the situation, but still. As the proud future member of the Royal Guard,  I will modify my behavior and-"  
  
"Papyrus," she interrupts. He looks shocked as if she's about to yell again. She averts her eyes. "I mean, uh... excuse me. Can I... say something."   
  
"Why... yes! Of course!"   
  
She sighs. "Papyrus. You weren't in the wrong. I wasn't being someone you should look up to. I was being a big dumb jerk."   
  
"I fully acknowledge it may be out of place for me to say this," Papyrus says, making a noise as if to mime clearing his throat. "But nobody is allowed to talk about Undyne that way! Even you yourself!"   
  
She chuckles. She can't tell him that what she was carrying had been a human, and she especially can't tell him that she had killed them. "Listen, I'm... sorry, alright?"  
  
He grins wider than she thought was possible. "Of course I accept your apology!"   
  
Even if she hadn't said what she was sorry for, Undyne realizes.   
  
"Hey," she says. "Why is it you want to be in the Royal Guard so bad, anyway?"   
  
He had appeared from nowhere one day, after all, and begged to become a member of the royal guard. But if it wasn't to hunt down humans, Undyne couldn't imagine why.   
  
"Simple! For the bettering of all monsters! Their hopes and dreams have to ride on someone, and nobody is a better ride than the Great Papyrus!" he boasts. "Once I capture a human, I'll be so popul- I'll be recognized for my efforts AND amazing puzzles! Not to mention I'll be able to work with you every day!"   
  
"Yeah, sure, but why me?" Undyne asks. "I mean, I expected the rest, but..." Asgore would have already accepted you into the Guard, she thinks. He's a big softie.   
  
"It's because you recognized my determination! You clearly saw a gem in the rough with me!" he says. "You inspire hope in monsters all across the kingdom! When they hear the clangs and other metallic onomonopoeias of your armor and such, they gather around like they're viewing a parade. If the Great Papyrus looked up to anyone, it would be his Captain--ahem, future Captain--of the Guard!"   
  
Was this what it felt like, to be idealized by someone so blindly? She saw herself as a child again, trying to balance with spears way too huge for her because they reminded her of Asgore's trident. She knew that wimps would idealize her--that was one of the job benefits of being Guard Captain. But Papyrus was so--sincere?  
  
Could she let him in the Royal Guard if she knew she'd have to make him kill?   
  
"I take your silence to mean that you are impressed with the caliber of my words!" he's saying. "W-well, they come from the heart, or at least the ribcage! I did receive different advice from another friend! He has a big heart, as the kids say, even if he is a rather small flo-"  
  
Something knocks over a trash can behind them. When they turn, there's nothing there, but the sense of being watched remains.   
  
"Er, anyway," he says. "I would not like to see you so upset again. It will be bad for our image when we bring hope to the whole kingdom and all."  
  
She gives a toothy grin. "Heh. You're a real dork, you know that?"  
  
"Can I still be a Royal Guardsman if I am a 'dork'-- HEY!" he says; Undyne's pulled him close and is attempting to noogie the top of his skull.   
  
"We'll see. We'll see." She's beaming brighter than when Asgore did the first time he was knocked down.   
  
She should never have let him see her doubt herself so much, so openly. She had doubts about what she was doing--so did anime characters, usually preceeding a monologue with dramatic poses (which would later form the basis for Mettaton). And, if she had to pick the top thing she admired Asgore for, it was always putting on a smile for her.   
  
Monsters gotta have hope.   
  
\---  
  
"Y'know, kid," Undyne says, in the present. She's helping change a bandage on Frisk's leg. She winces at the variety of scars on the child, ones that never quite healed properly. "I don't know how you do it, with you being such a little wimp and all. When I was your age, if I got cuts like that, I would've been howling. Just between you and me and all."   
  
She seems to realize what she said. "And that means you'd better not tell anyone, you got that?!"  
  
Frisk just smiles.  
  
\--------------------  
  
After several revelations, there was one pattern Frisk would notice amongst the six souls. They all had tripped or gotten lost and ended up underground that way.    
  
The world of humans was one in which everything was rational and logical. Even the magic spell they had used to seal monsters could be explained by enough scientific reasoning.   
  
But scientific reasoning, whether by human scientists or Alphys, could never measure the human soul. Alphys had written that the one thing that separates humans from monsters is humans' determination-- their will to live and thus influence the world around them.  
  
So no amount of reasoning could determine what would cause a human to end their own life. To dodge every root reaching for their ankle with such finesse that they could have fought Undyne and Asgore simultaneously and come out without a scratch, but instead jump into the hole and plummet to their death.   
  
\---  
  
His palms are shaking so hard, he nearly drops the trident. Frisk is standing their ground.  Asgore closes his eyes shut so tight he feels a pop and the world spins when he opens them again. He tries to channel images to bring an anger out in him--he stands in a field choked by dust, he stands beneath the ground atop which humans murdered his son.   
  
And Frisk tells him to stop fighting in a voice which quivers like flowers in a windstorm and the images in Asgore's mind always fade to the same thing: himself, standing above the coffins of the humans he's murdered in revenge.   
  
Sometimes he wakes up and feels like the world has begun to spin backwards. He would do the same things again, feel the same pains again, attempt the same hobbies again and pretend he enjoys them again. Even after he finds out about the ability to save, he's not sure if the world had been reloaded or if he'd been stuck in a depressive loop where he only ate because he knew he did the same thing yesterday and couldn't break the rhythm.   
  
Asgore knocks Frisk to the ground. Their toy knife flies from their hands and slides into Asgore's field of vision, which is barely high enough to look at the injuries he inflicts on the child.   
  
_"This is a special sword passed down to me from my father who had it passed down from his father," Asgore said, admiring an imaginary sword that he claimed to Asriel was 'invisible'. The boy had been curled up in his blankets to hide from nightmares (passed down by his sibling; just as invisible as the sword). "It's from the ancient Buttercup Kingdom."  
  
"You don't mean it."  
  
"Oh, but I do," Asgore said, his eyes wide like an owl's. "The handsome young crown prince wielded it to cut all the kingdom's nightmares in half like a steaming hot slice of pie." As he spoke, he carefully affixed the 'sword' on the wall above Asriel's bed. Then he sank back down to be face-to-face with Asriel and tucked him back in. "So long as you own this sword, it will cut all the nightmares up until they're too scared of it to bother you ever again."   
  
"But what about you?" Asriel said. "Won't you get nightmares now?"  
  
Asgore just chuckled. He stroked Asriel's ears to coax him to sleep the way he had when he was just a baby. "Ah, but I've owned this sword since I was your age. Now I've grown big and strong and nightmares won't come bother me anymore. One day you'll be big and strong too, and one day you can pass down this sword to your prince or princess."  
  
Asriel made a face, probably imagining having to get married (and smooch a GIRL)--or imagining having to stop living with Chara. The time for the latter would come sooner than he'd expected.  
  
"Until then, between this sword and myself, nothing bad will happen to you again. I promise," Asgore said.   
  
His son's eyes had started to droop closed. Asriel wanted to ask if the sword would protect Chara; Asriel wanted to ask if Chara would make fun of him for having an invisible sword because they had found the real knives but he wasn't supposed to tell Asgore that--but then he fell asleep.   
  
It took only weeks for Chara to become as intangible as the sword. When Asriel absorbed his sibling's soul and was headed for the surface, a world as distant to him as dreams and nightmares, he imagined taking the sword and putting it in a sheath. Nothing bad would happen to him again._  
  
Frisk is looking at Asgore, who's looking at the toy knife. The king of monsters is gripping the trident so tightly that he's about to snap it in half.   
  
"It is dishonorable to attack an opponent who has lost their weapon." Asgore speaks as if reading a line he wrote on his palm. He nudges the toy knife over to Frisk with his foot. The child takes it and stands slowly.  
  
Asgore refuses to look at Frisk, but can tell they're staring at him with a confused look.   
  
He tries to convince himself again, as the fight resumes, that he doesn't have nightmares anymore.   
  
\---  
  
Asgore, before having to fight Frisk for their seventh and final soul, is putting the fifth human's body in a coffin. He wishes with all his heart that the process were unfamiliar to him.   
  
Even before Chara and Asriel passed away, during the war, he'd never had to do anything like this. Monsters became dust when they died--he'd seen it firsthand again and again.  
  
Humans had only stopped hunting monsters and coexisted with them because hunting them had proven useless. They provided no food, no materials; monsters used resources but didn't yield them. Once the war began, the humans did get one thing out of hunting them: enjoyment.   
  
Asgore blames himself when the humans' items are lost. He places the fallen humans' bodies in the coffins having closed their eyes and put their hands over their hearts. He tries to keep their possessions with them--a cowboy hat, a notebook--as if they'd want them still when their souls could finally rest.   
  
He doesn't know if it works like that. Monsters wanted for little, which is why it was said they became dust. Humans had wanted for more and more, and it hurts when Frisk shows up wearing items he swore he placed in the humans' coffins with them.  
  
Asgore places a child to rest and does the same thing the next day with the same child. He finds himself in Waterfall one day acting as a teacher and has nightmares that he's holding the child's body for show-and-tell. He finds himself in Waterfall again as if the world has started over and drops one of the human's items. It remains there after the world reloads a third time and he puts the human to rest again with the same item on their body.   
  
He'd seen the suicidal human's body while placing it to rest. They had injuries to their feet which would never have healed. The scabbing suggested that, even though they had those foot injuries, they still tried to stand on their toes while only protected by thin ballerina's slippers. The human had been far underweight--not plump like Chara had been. Their ribs showed under their doll-like skin.   
  
Years after, Frisk had fallen into the Underground. The anniversary of Chara's death that year had come and gone. (Chara had never told them their birthday, saying they didn't know. Asgore had thrown a joint birthday party for them with Asriel. Now, all he had to remember them by was the day they died.)  
  
A sixth human had fallen, and finally, Frisk. The sixth human had died in Asgore's arms. Now, Asgore had landed a killing blow. Frisk was dying in his arms just like they had.   
  
He's done it. He's finally, despite his best efforts, collected the seventh human soul. He wants to feel tears flow so he can feel any indication that he's still a person--a living, breathing person with a soul--but he feels nothing.   
  
The Underground's expectations, their hopes, their suffering--he's carried it all with the additional burden of his own guilt. When he was young, ther children had played at being royalty; he had played 'farmer' and 'baker' and 'hermit' until his father flushed him out of his hiding places and made him learn how to be a proper prince, then king.   
  
Asgore feels himself stand again. As king, he should direct the vision of the kingdom, but he doesn't steer them any more than a hang glider directs the wind. He had once asked his father if, as king, he could do anything he wanted.   
  
His father had said yes, absolutely, if you want to have your throat slit in your sleep.   
  
As he looks down at Frisk, he thinks that would have been a better fate than the life he leads now.  
  
A strange breeze passes through the barrier. The flowers in his garden all bend back in response. One flower bends foward.   
  
\---  
  
His palms are shaking so hard, he nearly drops the trident. Frisk is standing their ground.  Asgore closes his eyes shut so tight he feels a pop and the world spins when he opens them again. He tries to channel images to bring an anger out in him--he stands in a field choked by dust, he stands beneath the ground atop which humans murdered his son.   
  
Frisk says he already killed them once. He doesn't know why, but he nods sadly.   
  
A world where a child had to die in order to shape a better future--Asgore didn't want a world like that. But he couldn't just withdraw, like the fifth human had. He had to change it. He didn't want a world where monsters had to live underground, sure. But he didn't want a world where humans' hate had grown so strong they turned on their own kind and drove them to end their own lives.   
  
(He recognizes all the humans who had died underground had friends, families, fathers who would wait every day in vain that it was all a mistake and their child might come back. It had happened for Asgore, once, but with a little flower. He didn't remember now.)   
  
Frisk tells him firmly to stop fighting. Asgore's movements are slow as if he were walking deeper and deeper into the ocean.   
  
A little flower watches them both. He can take the souls if Frisk wins. And if Asgore wins--he can reload again and again, and the hilarious thing is that Asgore will attempt to kill Frisk every time.   
  
The little flower--everyone's best friend!--sure has grown since the death of the girl with the apron. He's grown like he photosynthesized on the hatred around him that radiates like sunlight.   
  
It sure does still intrigue him that Asgore seems to not want to kill, but does it anyway. Every time he reloads, people do the same things, as if they are robots, slaves to lines of code. The little flower has reloaded so many times that he's lived multiple miserable lifetimes--sometimes buried in philosophical texts, sometimes buried beneath corpses. After reading texts bigger than his own body, the flower is left wondering if free will is a joke, and if they're all slaves to fate.   
  
He wonders if fate is mocking them all, even if it's his own free will that allows him to reload again and again, and Frisk's will overpowers his. It would explain why new humans fell into the Underground annually now, coincidentally on the date that Chara had died.   
  
And it would save him from wondering if the fifth human had ever wanted to commit suicide or if they'd heard beckoning from someone who had committed the act already.   
  
\---  
  
Flowey doesn't sleep. Not anymore. It leaves you too vulnerable in a kill-or-be-killed world, he tells himself. Or maybe it frustrates him that he wakes up every time.   
  
There had been times early on when he would squeeze his eyes shut tight and try to pretend he wasn't a flower. Later, in one of the many timelines he reset, he'd read all about phantom limb syndrome. There had been a precious few monsters it had happened to during the war. But there were no cases like his. He was, and is, alone.   
  
When Asriel first becomes a flower, in the midst of drifting to sleep, he feels hands again. Phantom hands. Cold hands. They aren't his own.   
  
They're gone whenever he opens his eyes. He would wonder if he was losing his mind. Of course, there's nobody to answer him.   
  
The phantom limbs return when he begins to drift back to sleep. Jagged fingernails, bitten to the base, scratch and pick buds and other parts off his stem. Flowey remembers: Chara observing the pads on Asriel's paws and drawing comparisons between fingernails and claws. Chara always bit their nails.   
  
"I hear that fingernails keep growing when you die," they had said. "I wonder how long mine will get when I'm dead. You better not be too afraid to look at my corpse when it happens, because if that happens once we're one being, I won't be able to see either."   
  
Flowey had left his eyes closed in the end. The phantom limbs had been the only company he had.   
  
\---  
  
If Flowey had photosynthesized on hate, Asgore had been force-fed it.   
  
The biological difference between humans and monsters, besides determination, is that monsters are composed largely of magic. Magic is composed largely of strong emotion, such as the hatred that had created the barrier.   
  
Asgore, then, had grown more and more sickly with despair until his best effort is letting Frisk win the fight.   
  
All Asgore's attacks are as deliberate and slow as if he's merely sparring, but some still hit their mark. Frisk still has an odd grace to them--or perhaps they've died once to Asgore's weapon and are trying harder than ever to survive.   
  
They have a grace like the fifth human had, and a peaceful nature like Asriel had--the two overlap in Asgore's mind.   
  
The idea of Asriel attempting suicide is enough to stab Asgore in his weakened heart.   
  
Everyone knows monsters become dust, but he's always wondered faintly what happened after that happened, ever since Asriel approached him and asked the same question. It had been after Chara had become ill (or so Asgore believes), and simply comforting Asriel until he'd forgotten the question had been enough. But now it stuck with Asgore instead.   
  
Their prophecy spoke of an angel. If Asriel is watching them now, such as in the form of an angel or a spirit or something, Asgore hopes he can forgive him.   
  
Asgore stands still while Frisk awkwardly scratches him with the toy knife's jagged plastic. His head is throbbing in pain. He wonders to himself, just once, if he truly can be so greedy as to make Frisk kill him and live the rest of their life with guilt like his.   
  
\---  
  
18\. It's exactly 18 days before he has to fight Frisk. It's exactly 18 days before he has to fight Frisk and the few people who are told about how the fifth human died are in debate on if it was an accident or not.   
  
Papyrus only overhears 'was it an accident' from Undyne once, and isn't sure what it means. But everyone in Snowdin reassures him of course it wasn't an accident, our king may be a softie but he's also big and tough and no human has ever gotten past him. Papyrus doesn't know it isn't from a lack of trying.   
  
If there's one thing that comforts Asgore, it's being able to comfort Undyne. She's been outwardly the same as ever, simply training and cooking and even standing with twice as much energy as usual. But she only hides pain from the common people and the enemy, and Asgore is neither.   
  
"It doesn't matter if it was an accident or not," he says. Undyne's going to protest of course it wasn't why would they help us by giving us a soul, but he cuts her off. "If this human won't use their soul to make a difference, we will. Now I need you more than ever to stay strong. Daylight is within our reach."   
  
When 18 days pass and he fights Frisk, it's, as if fate is mocking them all, by twilight.   
  
\----------------------  
  
"You've gotten taller since I saw you last."   
  
Frisk knows it hasn't been long, in reality. Toriel and Asgore are closing the gap between each other, even if it's only because Frisk is hanging between it, grasping one of their hands each.   
  
Asgore and the child sit on the front step of Toriel's house when Asgore makes the comment. Right on the other side of the door, inside the house, one of the walls is already marked with a growth chart--blue for Frisk, red for Papyrus (he insists; Toriel and Sans are happy to oblige).   
  
Toriel had been reluctant to let him babysit, but agreed based on the idea that Sans might be around to babysit Frisk and Asgore. The latter had cooked hot dogs and ate with Frisk while they both swatted away flies. And they spent some time just watching the sun in the sky, talking about everything and nothing. This had been what they had wanted when they first met, but the obligation was kill or be killed.   
  
Frisk had noticed they'd gotten taller once they didn't have to crane their neck back as far to see Asgore's face when he stood. Frisk similarly recognized how many children wouldn't be able to grow taller or mark their height on charts anymore. But when intrusive thoughts wormed their way into their mind, nothing irritated the thoughts more like passive acceptance of them. Forgiving them.   
  
There are several other things to focus on, anyway. It's a beautiful day outside. Birds are singing. Flowers are blooming.   
  
Asgore side-eyes the popsicle he pulled from the freezer for Frisk (he'd have to buy more for Papyrus later). It's melting in their hand. They're observing something in the distance, or so it seems.   
  
He can live with Frisk being awkward around him, he supposes. He's just happy they aren't afraid of him.   
  
Toriel had considered hiring someone for Frisk to speak with, but had told Asgore that he wasn't sure who would know what to say to anyone--even a child--on the side of monsters. Asgore knew well enough that she wanted to live in a world where everything was alright, where she couldn't take Frisk's grief and twist it as being her own failure as a caregiver.   
  
Asgore had lived with an unbearable grief for years. One of the reasons he had accepted his position as king was to prevent any monsters from having to live in despair. Now he couldn't save a single child?    
  
"Toriel told me how big you had gotten, but I hadn't known how much until I saw you earlier," Asgore is saying. "I bet one day you'll be taller than me!"    
  
Frisk nods. The popsicle is half-liquid on their hand, but they start to lap it up anyway.  
  
"You know, she's working quite hard. Toriel, I mean," he says.   
  
Frisk nods.   
  
"How is she doing? Baking pies? Are you vacuuming up white fur everywhere?"   
  
Frisk nods again. A group of kids bike down the street and look oddly at Asgore and burst into fits of giggles when further down the road. Minutes pass with no words passed between Asgore and Frisk on the warm breeze. Someone is walking their dog.   
  
Words said by someone on the radio ring in his mind: "With monsters back, am I going to have to stop walking my dog? Am I going to have to refer to him as 'mister' and give him a seat at the table?"   
  
Sans had long since put parental controls on the TV and computer, too, so the only shows available were Cartoon Network for Papyrus (and Frisk, when visiting). He and Asgore both knew they could only block out the prejudice for so long, though. Simply by being with the monsters, Frisk was still going to be judged.   
  
He sighs. He long had thought Toriel would know what to do, but she didn't know all the answers, either. Only through all their efforts jointly did they overcome adversity.   
  
"Did Toriel ever tell you the story about the time we first met?" Asgore asks.   
  
Frisk shakes their head.  
  
"Well... I'd suppose not." He scratches his head. He's long-abandoned his crown in favor of visors when the sun would get in his eyes, or simply nothing for the first time in ages. "I wouldn't expect her to talk about me--huh?"   
  
Frisk is nudging him, as if waiting to hear the story. They've put down their popsicle stick.   
  
"Okay, okay," he chuckles. The sticky warmth outside casts something of a magic over his words, and Frisk lets themself get lost in them. "Here goes. I was young and was going to be coronated--sort of like promoted, I suppose, to king. I would have been expected to choose someone as my queen, but I wasn't sure who to choose.  
  
"Some monsters wanted me to pick a human bride as a way of bridging the gap between our races. This was before... well. Before we were driven underground. Even then, things were very difficult between humans and monsters. I wasn't very good at meeting people-" Asgore stops for a moment and smiles bashfully, as if remembering something. "Most of the time, my father introduced me. The humans I met... let's just say they were not like you, Frisk.  
  
"One day, I was ruminating on the matter. I went to a gardening shop in hopes I would buy something to make me feel better. I could have had a servant gone, but I wanted to go myself-" He clears his throat. "And I had been too shy to ask.  
  
"There in the shop, I met the prettiest woman I had met in my whole life. Oh, I had wanted to impress her so badly! I thought if I grew the most beautiful bouquet of flowers in the world, I could truly impress her."  
  
Asgore lapses for a moment in his story again, and then Frisk just hears cicadas and bird calls.   
  
"You see, for weeks I grew those flowers and practiced exactly what I would say to her. When I finally picked the bouquet of flowers and took them to her, she was overwhelmed that someone of notability would go through such effort to impress her. For a little while, anyway.   
  
"She told me I had grown the flowers all wrong, and they were far tinier than they would have been if I'd grown them properly! I felt defeated. As I was about to leave, she called out to me.   
  
"'Where do you think you're going? If you don't learn the proper way now, you never will!' she said. From that day on, she showed me how to garden better." He looks; his can of soda is empty. Frisk passes theirs. After politely declining and being faced with Frisk's insistence, Asgore takes a big sip and crunches the can in his hand. Frisk claps.   
  
"We spent a lot of time talking on days like this, in the sun," Asgore says. "I do regret several things I have done. You know that. However... I don't regret a moment Toriel and I spent together."  
  
Asgore can read Frisk much better now. The words are on the tip of their tongue: it's not fair. It was the same argument they had used when trying to get Asgore and Toriel to even act civil--the child reasoning with the adults.   
  
He turns to face Frisk with a severe look. "Frisk. Of course many bad things have happened. That's why we aren't so close now. But we cannot always choose our paths. If I had decided to live a happier life as a gardener rather than king, I would never have met Toriel," he says. "Perhaps I'm not the best person to take this from. Sometimes, though, we have to persevere on the paths we are given."   
  
\---  
  
Asriel would be 16 today.   
  
Flowey is just as aware as both his mourning parents.   
  
It embarrasses him to see his father like this. The behemoth that so many people feared during the war isn't brought down by swords or guns, but by tiny shoes.   
  
Asgore never cleans out Asriel's room, no matter how long he's been gone. It's not that he ever expects him to come back. It's just too much to bear to realize he's moved on.   
  
A parent gives their soul for their child. Now, with both of his children gone, he's as empty as Flowey.   
  
He never expects Asriel to come back. It was against the natural order. But so was the child dying before the parent. In the saves in which he had learned who Flowey was, he'd all but been turned to dust. Asgore had never failed to make Asriel smile before--and that time, there was no 'invisible  sword', no 'bedtime  story', nothing but the sick reality of a powerful man brought to his knees as a sobbing wreck.   
  
(Even with his father beside himself, he also failed to make Flowey cry. Flowey thought himself to be above crying, later. He wasn't a crybaby like Asriel had been. He's too young to understand that despair can be shown in other ways.)  
  
Flowey had plenty of time since, after resetting those timelines, to witness much more of his father's despair. None of it had come close to the pain he'd seen when 'Asriel' did return.   
  
Asgore, as if familiar with misery, had recognized Flowey was miserable before he himself did.   
  
But at that moment, the little flower wonders again if fate is taunting him. He can't return to his old life. He can't end his life. Chara won't come back. Another human has fallen (a sixth) and Toriel has taken them in.   
  
The human had even seen through Flowey's plan to take their soul and the hag had interrupted at just the right time to save them. This would repeat with the next human, also a child, and their striped shirt so similar to his sibling's.   
  
It felt like a joke. A prank. One of Chara's pranks. One of Chara's pranks that he could never wake up from.  
  
Asriel would be 16 today.   
  
His parents are supposed to protect him from everything. He feels worldly and wise, deciding not to expose himself to them again. But of course a part of his mind remembers just how weakened and pathetic Asgore had been when he knew his son was alive. It would be so, so easy to do it again--Dad, help! I don't know what happened! Something transformed me!--and then go get the souls, and...  
  
And... he doesn't.   
  
It would be... too easy, he decides. It wouldn't feel like a victory. There isn't any point in showing everyone the real meaning of the world if he doesn't use it to win.   
  
He can't bring the behemoth down with tiny shoes.   
  
It rings distant in Flowey's memory--the time he'd accidentally stepped on a tack that accidentally had been placed facing upward accidentally in front of his—Asriel's--room. He remembers the sensation of bandages. He remembers his father commission a self-proclaimed 'artist' to design shoes for Asriel's feet. He remembers being so proud that he doesn't take the shoes off even in bed.  
  
Flowey is outside Asgore's room now. He hears the man's unsteady breaths and feels his pacing. He feels the vibrations on the floor as a flower. He can practically feel Asgore's heart beating slower and slower, threatening to stop.   
  
It had been something of a far journey from where Toriel resided, as far away from Asgore as she could be. Flowey had looked in the window once. He had to admit, he wasn't sure what he was expecting. Would it have hurt more to have seen Toriel having replaced him or Toriel missing him?   
  
It didn't matter; what he saw was both. The child inside looked visibly uncomfortable, which only added to Toriel's pain. It was as if the child realized they'd fallen into something far bigger than they could ever understand.   
  
Asriel would be 16 today.   
  
He, like many children, thinks he knows everything. He rejects what he doesn't understand. It starts a fire in him that his parents missed Asriel but not him--Flowey. They couldn't make him feel anything but would mourn by themselves all they wanted.   
  
He reloads. The child catches him staring in the window this time. Flowey smiles meekly. The sixth human calls out. Toriel uses fire magic aimed to scare him off, but it catches him and sets him alight. He's screaming not in pain, but in anger that he'd be so stupid as to think kindness and weakness would get him anywhere except literally dying again.   
  
He reloads. He supposes he can't blame the old hag. He erases from his mind that Toriel wanted to scare him and not murder him. If he were her, he'd kill himself too! Kill or be killed! Right, Chara?  
  
Right?   
  
Flowey--Asriel would be 16. He would be 16 in an alternate timeline in which Asgore says he's never seen a flower cry before. He would be 16 in that timeline when the old fool can't bring himself to hurt even an omnicidal maniac. He would be 16 when Asgore, able to block the every attack of even a furious Undyne, is hit by a fatal blow by the human because Flowey called out 'dad'.  
  
He sees them as possibilities in the code that never come true. Asgore would say he'd never seen a flower cry, but only because Flowey hid it from everyone, even himself. He, as a flower, was too rooted in his own ideas.    
  
It was easier to feel numb than feel pain. It was easier to hide than keep going. Toriel had done that.   
  
It was easier to believe wholeheartedly a flawed ideology because your sibling believed it. It was easier to adopt your sibling's pain as your own so they aren't really gone.  
  
It was easier to stay in a comfortable ignorance than face all the horrible things you've done after being unwillingly reincarnated.  
  
\---  
  
The sixth human beats Flowey every time.   
  
The experience as a whole winds up as a blueprint for how Flowey deals with Frisk. The sixth human has perseverence; Frisk has determination. The sixth human is quiet; Frisk is nearly silent.  
  
And Flowey never sees the eyes of either.   
  
Flowey is too weak physically to overpower anyone anymore. When he becomes Omega Flowey and he has the chance to step on someone rather than avoiding others' boots, the power goes straight to his head.  
  
Flowey doesn't fight Frisk after their encounter upon meeting for the first time. With Frisk, Flowey's strategy is to stalk. He's a predator in the wild. He doesn't make himself seen until the child kills Asgore for him.  
  
He would feel a twinge of regret when it happened. But, hell--Asgore was living proof that sometimes, killing is the only way.    
  
Every time the sixth human beats Flowey in a confrontation, they spare him. The child strolls past him. It's as if they want him to come back and try to kill them again.   
  
It takes several encounters for him to understand. The child doesn't truly spare Flowey, and they don't kill him. They do worse. They force him to live.   
  
"Albert Einstien said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results," they say.  
  
And, after Flowey tries to kill them in an ambush and fails: "You're trying your hardest to make me hate you. It's as if you want me to feel something for you rather than apathy."   
  
"That would be the normal emotional response," Flowey seethes, pressed underneath their foot.   
  
"As if you would know anything about that."   
  
They let him go and walk away, leaving him wondering if they had reloaded and done this before as well. It would explain how they know so much.   
  
When a year passed and Frisk had defeated him as Omega Flowey, he had thought Frisk had been attempting the same thing. To try to force him to live with his guilt. To watch his reactions like a specimen under a microscope.   
  
And yet there they were, ruining that for themself, patting him and telling him it was alright like nobody had since before Asriel died. He doesn't understand. He doesn't want to understand why anyone would pity someone like him and there it is, there's the first instance of guilt, was this Frisk's plan all along? He can't understand.   
  
He once thought he knew everything. The sixth human, a child, had been guilty of that themself. Then, with Frisk genuinely comforting him, the sum of all his knowledge tells him one response, one line of code: finish what you started when you first became a flower and kill yourself.   
  
\---  
  
It had been easy to forget underground, but the sun always rises. Even if Flowey controlled the world as its god, it wouldn't revolve around him.   
  
Even those who could see the sun climbing into the sky at the break of dawn could forget it or block it out with their hand. One child lives with his father, a collector of rifles, and wonders when his father will snap and he'll end up on the wrong end of the gun. One girl is so young, has a heart full of kindness, which finishes beating only years after it started. One human can't stand the hatred of humanity any longer, like Chara did, and climbs up the mountain to end it all, like Frisk did. And all the flowers seem to avoid breaking their fall.   
  
Frisk doesn't feel the sun when they fight Omega Flowey, as if he rose as tall as Mt. Ebott and blocked it out.    
  
Frisk doesn't feel the sun when they confront each individual soul, as if they were within worlds of their own. (A world where there's nothing but rising panic burning like fires in a pan, or knives that spin and lash every which way but one that can protect itself, with just an arrhythmic heart in them all.)   
  
Pain burns like the sun's heat all the same when Flowey kills them again and again and again as if they were his favorite toy to play with, or at least the only toy left in an empty world.   
  
Death feels like a bad fever. Frisk sees themself on their deathbed, thrashing and wheezing, with Asgore sitting helplessly nearby. "You are the future of humans and monsters... Chara! Stay determined...."   
  
And then there they are again, fighting Omega Flowey, doing the same thing and expecting different results.   
  
"Call for help. I dare you," Flowey says. "Cry into the darkness. 'Mommy! Daddy! Somebody help!'"   
  
It isn't the same in the other timeline, when Frisk fights Asriel proper. Then, they had all their friends with them. Now, Flowey is right. They're alone.   
  
Frisk calls for help. But the world is silent. The guns have nothing but smoke in their barrels. The pencils have all snapped with not a word left to write.   
  
"Gee! What a shame!" he says. "Nobody else gets to see you die!"   
  
He almost sounds disappointed.   
  
\---  
  
Flowey reacts to Frisk's touch as if he'd been hit. It doesn't seem like a far-off possibility that he would expect it from someone who looks so much like Chara.   
  
"If you let me live," he's saying, "I'll come back."   
  
Frisk shakes their head gently.  
  
"I'll-- I'll kill you," Flowey says. "I'll kill everyone you love."   
  
Frisk smiles, all their attention focused on Flowey, as if to suggest that he's the only friend they have in the world.   
  
"I'll... I'll-"   
  
But he stops. He doesn't know. This is the first time this has ever happened in any timeline. He finds himself looking about frantically, as if lost in a crowd, or as if Chara would step in and tell him what to do any minute now.   
  
All he sees is Frisk and their gentle understanding. They touch Flowey's petals gently, as if they might break him.   
  
His whole body aches, but the physical pain is an afterthought. Flowey can't focus on it through the despair he had repressed surfacing at once.   
  
"You can't make me live like this," he's saying. For the first time, he feels as small as he truly is. "Not with what they've done to me."   
  
\---  
  
It starts with a heartbeat.   
  
The six souls had never moved on thanks to despair. Flowey had lived through enough broken timelines to learn that much. What he never expects is for any of that to change.   
  
One of the souls moves against his will. Static displays on a screen. A limb twinges with sharp pain.   
  
Another heart beats in a different pattern, then a third and a fourth. Some kind of determination has been awoken within them.   
  
"Stop-" Flowey is begging. "STOP!"   
  
And the fifth soul rebels, and the sixth follows. Frisk closes their eyes and waits for explosions or screams, but none come for minutes at a time. Only then do they hear it-- the souls aren't tearing apart Omega Flowey's body. He's doing it himself.   
  
"YOU ALL ARE SUPPOSED TO OBEY ME!" he screams, a child playing a game in which the rules have changed. "STOP! STOP IT!"  
  
The hardest part for Frisk is to just watch. It's all they can do. In a world in which it's only Flowey and Frisk, the latter sees it all: the souls won't destroy Flowey from the outside like he begs, but will do it on the inside. They'll force him to feel again. Their fear. Their pain. They've merged with Flowey and their memories came, including the hopelessness they felt when they died.   
  
The souls had limited themselves with that pain before. So many others had done the same, to the point that the barrier itself could be called 'Asgore' rather than 'the barrier'. It's Omega Flowey, in the end, who destroys himself to try and escape again what he had for years been running from.   
  
The souls, with all their determination and all their despair, reload a save far beyond Flowey's memory just to make him watch.   
  
\---  
  
"You think you're always doing the right thing," Flowey says. "You think you treat monsters humanely. Then what if the humane thing is to kill me and put me out of my misery?"   
  
Frisk shakes their head again. They know what it's like to feel alone.   
  
"I... I don't want this. I can't take this." Flowey's voice seems to have lapsed into a different one. Frisk doesn't recognize it, and won't until another timeline, when they speak with Asriel. "Not after that. You understand, Chara. You killed yourself, too."   
  
The name doesn't ring a bell, but Frisk does remember climbing up the mountain without care as to if they ever returned. And yet here they are now, shaking their head, trying to quiet Flowey.   
  
In the future, when they fight Asriel, they bring his soul back. In the present, Flowey is empty. In the present, Flowey thinks that oblivion would be kinder than this.   
  
\---  
  
"You're crying, aren't you?"   
  
"I'm just--I'm just overwhelmed."  
  
"Haha... who's the baby here?"   
  
"Oh, Tori, look! He has your eyes for sure."   
  
"Hello, my child. I'm your mommy."   
  
"Everyone's waiting to meet you, the Underground's new prince."   
  
"Well, we certainly can't bring him out without a name."   
  
"I want his name to fit him. Perhaps-"  
  
"Oh, no you don't. You're the one who made the name 'Hot Land' stick, you know!"   
  
"What would you suggest for him, Tori?"   
  
"Hm..."  
  
"He will grow up to be selfless, like you."   
  
"And he'll always do the right thing, like you."   
  
"Yes... if he's willing to take the throne, he'll make a fine king. Humble and kind..."   
  
"You're crying again, Fluffybuns."   
  
"The Underground has waited so long to believe in something again... For a symbol of hope and love."   
  
"Yes. Our souls truly are bound together with this child."   
  
"I'm sorry you are born with such a great burden, little one. I wish you could have opened your eyes the first time to blue skies and green fields. No matter what happens, know that we will be here for you. We will love you with all our hearts."   
  
"He will be treated well here. I think he'll have plenty of opportunities to simply be a child."   
  
"Yes. That comes first, before any burden."   
  
\-----------------------  
  
The winter had killed all the insects, but now the crickets were back to singing outside Frisk's window all the same.   
  
They're back at Toriel's house, and due to gentle urging by Sans (and claims he would be home late), Asgore is staying over as well--he's even allowed the couch.   
  
She'd been afraid of that vulnerability, that if she let him close then she might care for him and let herself be hurt again. But in the end, she uproots her fears and begins to speak to Asgore in more than one- or two-word sentences.   
  
Asgore still sneaks about, not because he feels that he doesn't belong, but so he doesn't wake Frisk. When he peeks in their room, they're awake, listening to the crickets.   
  
"You can come in if you want," Frisk says.   
  
They've spoken before, of course, but their voice had been quiet, save for when when shouting to the lost souls--not that Asgore had lived long enough to hear. The only time he heard Frisk shout was at humans mistreating monsters, and they had stopped since they asked him why he didn't also.   
  
Now they seem to be speaking up more besides shouting, their voice even beginning to mature with age.   
  
Asgore tiptoes in. He kneels by Frisk's bedside.   
  
"Are you having trouble sleeping?" he asks.    
  
They sink into a familiar quiet. Then: "I dunno. I didn't want to go to bed yet."   
  
Asgore chuckles. The moon is full like the first night after they all escaped. Twilight is pouring into the room.   
  
"Well, me neither," Asgore says. He nods understandingly. "Couches aren't good on my old bones anymore. I thought I might stay up and watch the anime, but I don't want to wake Tori- Toriel."   
  
Frisk just listens to the crickets. They wonder how many people are listening to the same crickets, right now. They smell the scent of cookie dough on Asgore's fur.    
  
Asgore is humming a song under his breath, and it's easier for Frisk to follow the notes than to follow the complexities of emotion that even Asgore doesn't understand. And that's fine.   
  
"I want you to come with us to the fair again tomorrow," Frisk says after minutes of silence.   
  
"I think I'll be too big for any of the rides," Asgore chuckles.   
  
"There's still lots you can do!" Frisk tries to reason. But then they sink under their blanket, leaving only half their face uncovered. "And I want you to go."   
  
He pats their head gently. "All right. For you, I'd be happy to go."   
  
Frisk beams.   
  
"... But only if you go to sleep," Asgore says. "It's best for your health."   
  
"I don't wanna."   
  
He remembers that Toriel had mentioned having to console Frisk after nightmares. Maybe they're still worried about them, but doesn't want to mention it to Asgore.   
  
Asgore thinks. Frisk is growing up-- they're too old for the same things Asgore had used to coax Asriel to sleep. But they aren't Asriel, nor Chara. They're Frisk.  
  
And after all they've been through, they could stand to be babied a little.   
  
Asgore looks about the room as if for ninjas or secret agents. When Frisk raises an eyebrow, he puts a finger to his lips as if to shush them. Then, a moonlit glint in his eye, he reaches behind him and pulls what seems to be an imaginary sword from an imaginary sheath.  
  
"This is a special sword passed down to me from my father who had it passed down from his father," Asgore says.   
  
Frisk is quiet, as if awaiting what he'll say next.   
  
"It's from the ancient Buttercup Kingdom. A brave knight wielded it to cut all the kingdom's nightmares in half like a steaming hot slice of pie. So long as you own this sword, it will cut all the nightmares up until they're too scared of it to bother you ever again."  
  
Frisk lets him go on, for his benefit as well as their own. Yet when he tries to affix it above the wall, they stop him.   
  
"I want us to share it."   
  
"I've had it so long that--"  
  
"Everyone gets nightmares," Frisk insists. "Toriel gets nightmares. If you're gonna give me the sword, you've gotta have something to protect you too."   
  
Asgore slowly sits down on the edge of Frisk's bed. It creaks under his weight. "Are you sure?"  
  
"Yeah!"  
  
"You're not going to keep it all for yourself? Or sell a valuable sword like this on your internet?"   
  
"No backsies," Frisk says firmly. Their eyes are starting to droop. Asgore lets himself relax somewhat- he's afraid for a moment that Toriel would kill him if she found he left the couch- but Frisk rests their head against him, and everything feels fine.   
  
"Then you'll have to pinky promise," Asgore says.   
  
In the end, it takes nearly Frisk's whole hand to wrap around Asgore's pinky finger. Even their whole body is so small nuzzled into his fur.   
  
Both of them are still hurting. One of the foster caretakers Frisk had lived with, once, had a crotchet which read, 'the future is made of nows'.   
  
They aren't sure if revealing the secret about Asriel would help each moment in the 'now' hurt less for Asgore. Maybe they'll tell him about how Asriel bloomed out of Flowey again. Maybe one day. But in the moment, everything feels alright, and they see no need to.   
  
"G'night," they whisper.   
  
"Goodnight," Asgore whispers back.   
  
Sometime in the distant past, Asgore might have told Chara that they were the future of humans and monsters--such a big weight on a child so young. Now, with crickets chirping outside and a world of monsters wishing to the stars like they had always dreamed, he might tone it down.   
  
He might just say Frisk was a great kid, and they would both be happy to leave it like that, nestled together as if part of a big and happy family. 


End file.
